Wishful watching

Bob Keefer

Monday

Mar 21, 2011 at 12:01 AM

HECETA HEAD — Emily Hogan drove all the way from Eugene to the Oregon Coast on Sunday in search of migrating whales.

She didn’t find any whales — at least she hadn’t by late morning — but she seemed happy enough to settle for gray skies, driving rain and the cheerful company of a group of volunteer guides who’d set up shop in the Highway 101 turnout that overlooks Heceta Lighthouse for the first day of a weeklong whale-watching program.

“I remember hearing last spring about the whale watch,” Hogan said from inside a snugged-up parka hood. “It didn’t really work out for me then. Yesterday morning I just happened to think about it. ‘This is my chance!’ So I looked it up on the website and headed here for the day.”

“It” would be “Whale Watching Spoken Here,” a program run by Oregon State Parks that places trained volunteers at 26 sites along the Oregon Coast — as well as one each just over the border in California and Washington — for a full week in March and in December during the height of gray whale migration.

March is the time of year that gray whales head north from the warm Mexican lagoons where they breed each winter and later have their babies. This time of year, explained veteran volunteer Cheryl Haskell, the whales you’re likely to see off the Oregon Coast tend to be adult males and older juveniles; the mothers and babies head north to the Arctic feeding grounds a little later in the season.

“My best day was three years ago in the spring,” Haskell said while Hogan looked vainly out over the ocean for any signs of a spout or a fluke. “I saw 144 whales in a day. Humpbacks and grays. Though mostly we see grays here.”

A retired school teacher who lives in Cheshire, Haskell has been staffing whale watching stations along the coast for 14 years. She was a little surprised not to see more whale action on Sunday. Despite the soggy weather, visibility was pretty good and the ocean swells were small. She pointed out over the water.

“It’s 28 miles to the horizon,” she said. “And it’s about five miles out to where you can see the change in color.”

The whale migration runs through about the end of May, she said, though some whales — between 200 and 400 — seem to think Oregon is just about far enough to travel each year.

“We do have some whales who stay all summer,” she said. “The grays. They know the coastline and tend to be fairly close in to shore.”

Despite their size — they can grow to be 45 feet long — gray whales eat tiny shrimp called krill, filtering the animals from each mouthful of water and sand with stiff plates called baleen.

Up the coast a bit, a pair of retired schoolteachers from Eugene, Thom Strunk and his wife, Robbin Spraitz, staffed their more-comfortable whale-watching post inside the Cape Perpetua Visitors Center.

They, too, were wondering where, exactly, the whales might be.

“The ocean is pretty flat today,” Spraitz said. “If they were out there close enough, we’d be seeing them.”

The couple signed up for the daylong volunteer training from Whale Watching Spoken Here two years ago and haven’t looked back.

“My wife has been telling people about whales for years,” he said. “Now we can give them accurate information.”

For the couple, though, the experience hasn’t been entirely about whales.

“The fun part is, you get to talk to people from all over the state, all over the country and all over the world,” Spraitz said. “We once saw 22 whales in a three-hour day. But we’ve talked to as many as 120 people in a day. This morning there was a whole family from Wisconsin. You get people from all over the world. It just blows me away.”

But there really are whales here sometimes.

Right?

Spraitz thought carefully about that.

“I am curious about what the effect of that major earthquake in Japan is,” she said. “Did that have an effect on the whales? Or, maybe, you know, we’re just talking too much and not watching out for them.??…?”

Hogan, meanwhile, may have actually seen one whale by the end of the day.

Or perhaps she didn’t.

“I did see a bunch of sea lions and what I believe to have been a lone whale,” she said. “Or, it could have just been a large gray wave.”

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